Rollicking Comedy and Paranoid Science Fiction Come Together on the Sixth Day of the Festival

It looks like space-time has been torn apart in Sitges. The sixth day of the Festival was held amid euphoria and frenzy. The presentation of Bulk, this year's major oddity, was attended by its unclassifiable director Ben Wheatley, one of the most genuine voices in contemporary British cinema, who received the Time Machine Award. However, the most biting comedy also infiltrated the Meliá through the imposing No Other Choice, directed by the virtuoso Park Chan-wook.

A Mischievous Satire with a Korean Passport

Possessed by this year's theme, which responds to the slogan “Laughter and Chills,” Park Chan-wook -creator of seminal postmodern films such as the canonical Old Boy, winner of the Award for Best Feature Film at Sitges 2004, or the extremely lunatic I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, winner of the Award for Best Screenplay in 2006- brought an end to the tons of hype that had been building up these days at our Mediterranean film competition leading up to the eagerly awaited screening of No Other Choice.

Winner of the People's Choice Award for Best International Film at the Toronto Film Festival and nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice, this refreshing comedy could well be described as one of the big sensations of this year's lineup. If we add to this the fact that Sitges audiences have been religiously attending the premieres of his films and praising his meandering career as a director and screenwriter, the wait couldn't be extended any longer.

Chan-wook, a skilled surgeon in perversion through exercises in meticulous mise en scène, with careful attention to detail, dared to undertake a refreshing reworking of the novel of the same name by American writer Donald Westlake, already adapted by Costa-Gavras in the memorable and very different The Ax. Taking a step back, the Korean director once again invokes the keys to his particular universe, which hypnotically swings between order and chaos, through a mischievous and bloody satire against savage capitalism, the digital society, and, ultimately, hypocritical attitudes.

After working for twenty-five years at a paper company, young Man-soo, played by the charismatic Lee Byung-hun, is suddenly fired. His unemployment drags on, weeks turn into months, and his desperation to protect his family will drive him to devise a sinister plan to wipe out the competition. What happens next is well worth mentioning. This is how the audience who had the opportunity to enjoy the latest offering from Chan-wook, a leading filmmaker, expressed it in an Auditorium that was packed to the rafters.

A Lynchian-Flavored Paranoid Oddity

A true chameleon of genre moviemaking, British filmmaker Ben Wheatley has left behind a trail of remarkable achievements in the fantastic, horror, and even black comedy genres. From his atypical feature debut, the delirious thriller Down Terrace, to the fascinating Kill List, an exploration of folk sects presented at Sitges 2011 and nominated for the Méliès d'Or, Wheatley's work has navigated different territories. He is the man behind the eccentric and rollicking Sightseers -winner here at Sitges 2012 of the Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Actress for Alice Lowe- and a parable as nihilistic and chilling as High-Rise, which brilliantly adapted the novel of the same name by the challenging J. G. Ballard. Equally notable was In the Earth, his previous film screened at Sitges, a psychological thriller set during a pandemic that ingeniously blended humor and horror.

Presented in the Official Selection, Bulk is Wheatley's new film after temporarily venturing into mainstream cinema. In this regard, he proposes a full-fledged back-to-basics approach to return to his own essence. In other words, we are dealing with an unconventional way of approaching the thriller as a labyrinthine structure with scientific errors, multidimensional beings, and doors that lead to other worlds where it's not difficult to find echoes of David Lynch's filmmaking. We could easily describe Bulk as one of the great fantastic oddities of the year, but also as a fascinating love letter to low-budget cinema that flirts with string theory on subatomic particles.

As for the cast of this playful science fiction experiment, the performances from Noah Taylor, Alexandra Maria Lara, Sam Riley, and Mark Monero are all outstanding. They joined the filmmaker at this afternoon's juicy Encounter, sharing their thoughts on creative freedom and the financial challenges when it comes to making movies. The crew also discussed the process of constructing the film, its Citizen Kane-inspired soundtrack, and the design of the spectacular end credits.

In any event, the screening of Bulk at the Meliá Auditorium was the perfect climax to the presentation of the Time Machine Award to the genuine Ben Wheatley for having created a filmography as disconcerting as it is unclassifiable in contemporary British film production.

Suburban Revenge

The numerous crew from Luger entered the Sitges Meliá Hotel like a gang of mercenaries from a spaghetti western. Director Bruno Martín, co-writer Santiago Taboada, soundtrack composer Levi Star, one of the Festival's regular artists, Raúl Cerezo, in his role as executive producer, and a large part of the cast, starring rude boys David Sainz (Obra 67) and Mario Mayo (I'll Crush Y'all), attended the Festival to present this bloody Spanish independent debut feature nominated for Best Film in the Òrbita section.

The poster is already a declaration of intent. The gun that appears opening fire refers to the title. The Luger was the semi-automatic weapon used by the Nazis during World War II. This weapon - also known as Parabellum, which in Latin means “Prepare for war” - is the surprise that Rafa and Tony, two friends with turbulent lives played by Sainz and Mayo, discover inside a safe in the trunk of a stolen car. Selling the gun at a pawn shop is the worst decision they could have made. The leader of a criminal gang will try to get it back at any cost.

Bruno Martín makes his fiction feature film directorial and screenwriting debut, bringing his passion for 1980s action cinema to “a microcosm of the Madrid suburbs,” as he revealed to the press. Luger addresses issues typical of westerns, such as honor and revenge, to talk about thuggish brotherhood, using the premise of a single firearm as the source of tribulations in a frontier setting, probably in the same vein as immortal classics such as Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 and Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog.

Analog Psychedelia and a Kidnapping in Bangkok

Just a few minutes away from the Festival's nerve center, which today also screened Honey Bunch, the new horror film by Canadian duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli (Violation), Sitges continued its non-stop celebration of the season's best genre films. The Escorxador theater welcomed large audiences for the presentation of movies including CAMP, a terrifying descent into the sense of guilt by Canadian director Avalon Fast, and Anything That Moves, the new psychedelic exercise directed by Alex Phillips (All Jacked Up and Full of Worms) through a delightful 16 mm photography that transports us to a monstrous Chicago where a young delivery boy, played by newcomer Hal Baum, finds himself caught up in a spiral of murder and conspiracy featuring the stellar appearance of two porn movie divas: Nina Hartley and Ginger Lynn.

Meanwhile, at the Prado Movie Theater, the strings of anguish got pulled really tight. Crushed is the new piece by British director Simon Rumley, who was also present in the Panorama section at Sitges 2016 with Fashionista, and now competes in Òrbita, narrating the journey of a family that puts their faith and resilience to the test when their young daughter gets kidnapped. This magnetic thriller, written by Rumley himself, features an international cast including names such as Sahajak Boonthanakit, Nadech Chatwin, and Kevin Lea Davies.